With a live performance by Charbel Haber of a specially commissioned music composition for the installation.

At a time where our worlds continue to shrink and where public and personal spaces are increasingly contested in our daily life, the BAC Central Hall commission is a proposal to experiment with the types of worlds and territories that we may be able to create for ourselves and for each other within our existing realities. The commission employs Beirut Art Center’s entry hall as its testing ground, offering an annual invitation for an artist/architect/designer to transform it into a place of convergence and action, but also one of rest and contemplation. It’s an attempt to rethink the ways we inhabit a place and what a different configuration of elements might allow us to do within these rigid, and functionally predetermined destinations. The commission hopes to address some persistent questions around hospitality and settlement, relationship to the built-environment and proportionality of scales; and questions what our social spatial needs might be now after a series of ungrounding calamities.

For the first iteration, artist Marwan Rechmaoui will create Municipalities, an engaging structure that aims to bring people together for different purposes, including reading space at times and experimental music host at others, it also offers  moments of reflection and respite.

This commission has been made possible with the support of Rafi Manoukian.